15.5.13

CHARLIE & ME

(Published in Urbanite Magazine)

CHARLIE & ME

They say parents can't change. And they're right. So how do you learn to love the father you can't begin to understand...by Mat Edelson

I could feel his body tremble as I
held him, and it felt oh so strange, for I had never held him before. Nor,
truth be told, had he held me. At least not since I was out of diapers (and maybe, as
I had never asked my mother or him, not even then).For well over a week Mom and I had waited by his
bedside. Somehow, at age 73, he had survived the nine-hour surgery, the one his
first assigned cardiac surgeon had refused to perform, telling me—quote—Son, there are some things that are worse
than death.

Of that
brutal operation, the one that wrapped seven inches of fraying aorta in a
protective mesh that looked uncannily like the safety net into which a high-wire specialist could tumble and yet not die, my father would have no
memory. He would not recall his body swollen to the bursting point with fluids,
his head the size of pumpkin, or that I cried at the sight of that handsome
face so grotesquely distorted.

He would
also forget his painful struggles against the repeated intubations that cut off
his commanding voice, his thick fingers attempting to communicate in sign language
the fog that was filling his mind—h-e-d
h-u-r-t…w-a-t-r…t-u-b-e o-u-t n-o-w. It was though the anesthesia washing
slowly from his body was pulling his thoughts away as well.

But what
was happening at this moment he would not forget, never. Nor would I. The
surgery had literally shut his body down. His heart, lungs, even kidneys had
been taken off-line, their jobs temporarily turned over to machines. The body doesn’t take kindly to this division of labor, and tends to
kick like an old mule when it’s given the job back. The colon is
especially stubborn; after more than 144 hours, Dad’s was still on hiatus. If
it didn’t wake up soon, surgery loomed.

Suffice to
say, the alarm went off. Suddenly. Violently. One minute Charlie was in bed,
the next he was trying to do a ten-foot dash to the bathroom in a hospital
Johnny, moaning IhavetogoIhavetogoIhavetogo!!
I jumped, Mom jumped, he jumped, 200-plus pounds suddenly thrust upon short
legs that had atrophied far quicker than any of us realized. My dad’s mind had
just written a check his body couldn’t cash, and as he sagged off the bed and
into my arms, and the horror and shame crumpled his always proud face as his
body let go its burden, I rocked him gently, the two of us, at once both lost
and found. And I whispered in his ear the only thing I could think of to say. It’s okay, Dad, it’s okay, Dad, I’ve got
you, it’s okay.

***

More than one male friend of mine
has said their own childhood ended the instant they first held their first-born
in their arms, a moment freighted with a single weighty word: Responsibility.

But
underneath that awesome burden is (hopefully) choice, a conscious desire to
create a life out of a shared love, to prove that one plus one can equal a
joyful three, math be damned. Parenthood, in its ideal form, is an act of heroic volunteerism.

But
parenting your parent? In the case of my father, I was one pissed-off draftee.
I get the feeling I’m not alone. It’s tough enough caregiving a parent you both
love and like, who operates on the
same wavelength as you, shares a part of your soul, and is cognizant of the
burden of caregiving because, dammit they did it themselves. For you.

But what
about that old-school dad, the one who parented by providing cash, not comfort, and now expects you, his caregiver, to pick up the pieces by
listening to orders instead of requests? A person who once told you, straight-faced
and sober in a bar—the only time you ever asked him out for a drink—“What makes
you think fathers and sons are supposed to be friends?”

We
yiddishe-folk have a word for taking care of someone like this: Oy.

Now let’s
get something straight right here. Lots of
people (like my best friend) grow up in truly abusive situations--drugs, violence, alcohol, the works--with parents
who should never have been allowed to procreate. Not me.
Never saw any of that. My old man did the best he could considering the
emotional IQ ran pretty low in his family. My Polish grandfather believed
children were only good for one thing: labor. Charlie went to school, worked at the family’s 24-hour newsstand from 4 to past midnight, studied (OK,
crashed out) on the subway back to the Bronx, and would’ve likely slept through
high school if his friend Sammy hadn’t thrown pebbles at his window to wake him
at sunrise. Nor was Grandma Jane exactly touchy-feely. Once, Dad’s parents lost
sight of him in a big park. They left, figuring some boys in the park would find
their son and bring him home. Luckily, some did.

So, Dad’s
emotionally dense. Still, he never hit me. (Thank God: He was so strong that a
penny-arcade brass arm-wrestling machine he pinned declared “YOU BELONG IN A
ZOO.”) Nor did he ever lay on a hand on my mother. Or yell at her. He adored
her. Worked fourteen hours a day in the newsstand for her. And when he lost her to cancer in 2003 after fifty-three years of marriage, suddenly he found himself alone and frightened. As was I,
his only child.

And why not? The most important woman in both of our
lives was gone. Mom had been the buffer, a one-woman
DMZ who had kept the testosteroned combatants far enough apart that some civil
discourse could take place. “Don’t give up, Matty, he’s trying,” she would say
on my increasingly infrequent trips home to New York over the last twenty
years. I have no doubt she was giving my father the same message
regarding me.

The truth was Dad and I spoke a different language. We
may have both voiced words of love, hope, and security, but we lacked a Rosetta
stone to help us understand them. Publicly, he’d brag to anyone about his son,
The Writer. But privately, it was all about the bucks. “How much did you make?”
was often followed by, “Y’know, Matty, you’d make a good living as a salesman.”

Dad never
read my work; when I handed him my first book, he thumbed through the first few
pages and tossed it on from his passenger seat onto the dashboard. “I’m tired,
he said. “I’ll look at it later.”

It never
occurred to me that my father, my childhood hero, was intimidated by my written
words. His own father was illiterate, and he himself, intelligent but
negligently educated formally, was more comfortable with the New York Daily News (“New York’s Picture
Newspaper”) than some glossy high-falutin’ text, even if it was bylined by his
boy. “You’re like your mother…smart,” was all he would say, as he’d put one of
my stories aside with nary a glance. I never heard what he was really saying--the way he truly felt about himself. “You’re
not like your father. Dumb.”

That I’ve
finally learned to see through my father’s words to see the man, and accept the
man, and, yes, love the man, and even—whoa!—enjoy being in the man’s
presence…well, we’re giving away the end of the tale here, yes? That day in the
fall of 2000, when my father fell into my arms and I was
thrust into being responsible for someone other than myself for the first time
in my life…let’s just say neither of us could have imagined the trip we were destined to take.

***

The continuous
thread—and the constant source of tension—in our relationship was our mutual
inability to anticipate how the other would react in any given situation. Not
to get too psychobabble-y, but when it came to my father, I had the motherlode
of expectations about how he should act, this overblown notion of what it meant
to be a man. It was the source of nearly all the disappointment and anger I
feel towards him. When his accountant suggested he transfer his assets into
Mom’s name weeks before undergoing the life-threatening aortic surgery, I
expected him to comply. After all, he always made it a point to tell anyone in
earshot, “I’d do anything for Clair.”

Yet, his
initial reaction? “Well, your mother could die before me.” Never mind that she wasn’t the one about to undergo the
operation, he was. And when Mom did
get sick with colon cancer in 2001, I expected my father to care for her, the
same way she’d cared for him since 1996, when the aneurysm that lead to his
eventual surgery was discovered. Within weeks of her first chemo treatments, my
father turned to me and said, “Your mother, she’s breaking my balls. She always
wants things done for her.”

After Mom’s
death in 2003, dad's self-centered behavior things only got worse. A social worker friend of mine calls it the “More-so’s”…as
in, when people age and go through serious life traumas, their basic
personality become more so. Dad’s already Charlie-centric worldview became
cemented through fear, grief, and loneliness. Through that first year following
her passing, as he went on about how distraught he was and how angry he was
that she died before he did, I was amazed that he never once inquired about how
I felt. When I finally asked him why that was so, he meekly replied, “I figured
you felt just like me.”

Forced to
deal with everything from his finances to his declining health to his newly
emergent love life, I tried to treat my father the way I would want to be
treated. I expected that he wanted to make the important decisions in his life,
and it was my job to put him in the best possible position to make those
choices.

How wrong I
was. To discover how a couple manages their household, divvies up life’s
tasks, organically decides what, and when, and where…these are not things
children know. Nor are they written down. (But they should be. Just two
columns: This is where your mother called
the shots…This is where your father
played Big Daddy. That page alone could save thousands of hours of therapy
for the kids once a parent is gone.)

It turned
out my father didn’t want to make any decisions at all. Opinions? He had
plenty. Especially about the decisions he demanded others (i.e., me) make for
him. But as for taking the initiative? As the sign on the Belt Parkway in
Brooklyn says, fuggedaboudit. Family
friends would call me and say they’d just spoken to my father. It didn’t matter
what the question—“When are you selling your house?” “Have you come up with a
plan for losing weight” “Have you decided to go for bypass surgery?” “How are
you paying the live-in help?”—the answer was invariably the same:

“Ask
Matthew, he’s handling it.”

In fact, I
took two years off from writing to handle it. From selling the house, to
packing the house, to buying the condo in Florida, to moving him to Florida, to
moving him back to his brother’s apartment in New York, to getting the
cardiologist, to finding the rehab
hospital, to finding the permanent live-in aide
because he refused to handle certain hygienic issues, to...every day the goddamn
phone was ringing with something he expected me to take care of from south of
the goddamn Mason-Dixon line (“Mat, I didn’t get the newspaper today. Did you
pay the bill?”).

Thousands of hours, thousands of miles, thousands of dollars. Thank
you’s? Hardly. Would’ve been my way. Not his. Did he love me? Yes. Did he know
how to express that?

No.

***

And so my anger, rage, and yes, at
times hatred, grew. It was being fueled by my greatest expectation of all: That
my father, in all our dealings, would meet me halfway. Dealing with him was
like doing some bizarre mental isometric exercise: I was pushing against a man
who could not yield because he was set in stone.

He would
ask for help—with his weight, his understandable depression, his aches and
pains—and I would provide it, only to watch him sabotage himself at every turn.
After a 2005 bypass led to a serious infection, I baby-sat him through twelve grueling weeks of rehab, where after three
months of being confined to hospital bed he’d worked his way back from barely
being able to sit up to walking down the hall with a walker.

I took him
home that day, his promise to the doctor still fresh in my brain—“Yes, I’ll use
the walker everywhere”—only to watch him toss it aside the moment he got in
the apartment. “I don’t need it,” he said,
grabbing at doorknobs to propel himself down the hall.

My
frustration exploded the day after his eightieth birthday. I'd flown down to surprise
him in Florida on his birthday. I walked into his apartment around 11 a.m.;
Gwen, his aide, said he was in his bedroom. I went in, kissed Dad on the
forehead, and he opened his eyes. “Hi,” I said. “Happy Birthday.” He looked at
me and said, “Hi. I’m having a bad day.” With that, he pointed to a small chair
in the corner of the room, bade me to sit down, and went back to sleep. And
that’s where he laid for the rest of the day, undressed, unmotivated,
unappreciative, just completely….un.

The next
day, when he was finally up and around, I lit into him. I started softly but
forcefully, and with each deflection on his part (“Not today, I’m not up to it;”
“I’m old, what do you want from me?”) I zoomed right past wanting understanding
into straight-out venting. My voice soared; my words grew foul.

And my
father had a complete meltdown. Tears, trembling, and, most frightening of all,
a complete lack of comprehension on his face. It shocked me into a memory, of
the time I came home only to find the dog I had just adopted had peed all over
my bed. I dragged the dog outside and started screaming at it. The look in its
eyes as it cowered said, W-w-w-what have I
done??

I never
yelled at that dog again. Now, with my father, I was ashamed at what I had
done, no matter how much of a “right” I had to do it. I was expecting my
father, who never had more than a child’s ability to deal with his own
emotions, to somehow “grow up” at age 80. Somehow, between his sobs, I finally
got it. There was no compromise to be had. There was no halfway point at which
we would ever meet. He could not change.

But I
could.

I won’t lie and say I completely dropped any expectations I had for my
father, but I did start seeing the world through his eyes. So many of our
fights had occurred because I tried to explain things to him, make him understand
why I was making certain decisions. My dad never wanted explanations: He just
wanted people to agree with whatever came out of his mouth, no matter how
outrageous.

So that’s
what I started doing. Agreeing. And a funny thing has happened. The more I’ve
stepped away from my own ego, my own need to be right, the better my father and
I have gotten along, and the more appreciative my father has become. (And
whoever thought I’d live to see the day he'd end many a conversation with, “I
love you, baby.”)

I think on
some level my dad knows all his talk is just that. I suppose a cynic might say
that humoring my father is an act of manipulation. I choose to see it as a
conspiracy of kindness, an unspoken acknowledgment between two men who need
each other that time is short, so let’s dream big and go out laughing.

And so when
my father talks now about all the things he’d like to do—go to Israel, learn to
walk better, marry his girlfriend—instead of my pointing out all the speed
bumps in those roads—you can’t go to Israel when you can’t even make it across
the apartment, you can’t walk well because you’re fifty pounds overweight and
won’t shut your mouth, and your girlfriend has only visited you once in the
past year—I just nod, smile, and say, “Wouldn’t that be great?”

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About Me

As a famous TV shrink once noted, the key to a full life is "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants." I take my work, my writing, seriously. Me? Not so much. After 30 years in the journalism game, I'm using this blog to step out from behind the third-person curtain. Opinion, essay, informed reportage...I can't guarantee what you'll see from day-to-day, but I promise I'll give it an honest turn and a unique take. Let me know whatcha think.
Thanks, as always, for your time and consideration,
Mat